It’s quite difficult to pin down what specifically causes a router to fail. For example, if you have a dead router, hand it to an electrical engineer and asked him or her…

"Can you tell me what caused this thing to die on me?"

…the engineer would not say, "It was x that killed it."

Instead, testing would have to be done to determine the cause, and it would take a while. Maybe it was crappy firmware. Or an electrical short. Or it suffered from some heavy EMI. Or it was tiny bits of condensation. Or it was something as simple as a bad power adapter. Or something else entirely. There are any number of ways to kill a router.

It’s more important to rule out false positives and know how to recognize warning signs, if any, that a router is about to fail.

Ruling out false positives

False positive for a router failure: Google Maps

I know of one real-world example that can be replicated easily, making it appear like your router is having a problem when it in fact isn’t.

Using the web site Google Maps on the Windows operating system with any web browser, if you load up a map then quickly pan the map in combination with some fast zoom in/outs, this will make too many network requests and cause your internet connection to "freeze" for up to 90 seconds.

Google Maps works in such a way where it contacts several different servers at once when panning/zooming around the map, and using it too quickly will time out the connection temporarily in Windows.

You may say, "But my router can handle a ton of connections. What gives?"

Since Windows XP Service Pack 2 up to present with Vista and Windows 7, the Windows OS is purposely engineered to limit network requests whereas previously it wasn’t.

End result: Not a router problem. It’s Windows doing it – by design.

I have only been able to replicate this issue using the Google Maps web site. Google Earth doesn’t have this problem and neither does Yahoo! Maps, Windows Live Maps, MapQuest or any other mapping site. Or any other web site for that matter.

To rule out my own router as the problem, I tested this on another ISP using a router made by another manufacturer. Same result. Time-outs with Google Maps – but only on Google Maps when using it heavily as noted above.

False positive for a router failure: Bad network cable

A new router obviously won’t cure a bad network cable. If troubleshooting a router, always replace the network cable first, both to the PC and to the cablemodem.

Ruling out a bad port

It is not outside the realm of possibility that the port on the router that connects the network cable to your PC’s network card is bad. If you’re plugged into port 1, try port 4.

Why 4 and not 2?

Because it’s the furthest away from the port which may be causing the problem.

To note: Having a bad port is an unlikely situation, but as said above it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Are there warning signs when your router will fail?

In most instances there are no warning signs when a router is about to stop working. You’ll be using the internet normally and then *poof*, dead connection. Modem lights look fine but router lights are either all on, all off or blinking in a "weird" way.

More expensive routers will give at least a little bit of warning (usually 4 to 7 days) before failing altogether, seen in the form of random disconnects. One reason this this may occur is because the crash recovery isn’t working properly any longer, causing the connection(s) to drop at random intervals. And that’s all the warning you need to know that yes, the router will stop working soon.

What can you do to extend router life?

It’s easy to extend the life of your router if you follow these simple steps:

1. Keep it off the floor

Some people simply run out of desk space and "demote" the router to the floor. Bad idea, because that’s where all the dirt is. And even though your router most likely has no fans, that doesn’t mean dirt cannot get into it and end the router’s life early.

2. Avoid cable stress

Network cables that are pulling on their ports is just bad news. If you’ve got a network cable that’s just slightly too short and has tension on the port it’s connected to, do yourself a favor and just buy a longer network cable.

3. Keep it away from the PC

Common occurrence: Seeing a router sitting directly on top of the PC. It shouldn’t be there. The PC is vibrating, even if only slightly. Those vibrations can lead to early router failure later.

Not all PC cases vibrate, but many do – especially when the optical drive is in use.

4. Never shut it off unless you absolutely have to.

I have heard the story more than once where someone shuts a router off, turns it back on, and it dies.

Unless troubleshooting a network connection, there’s really no reason to ever shut a router off.

5. Don’t upgrade the firmware unless it’s required.

Router firmware updates are like BIOS updates in the respect that you should never apply the upgrade unless there’s something specific in it that fixes a legitimate problem. If there is no problem to be fixed, don’t do it.

Read the release notes for router firmware updates first and always.

If from the release notes you learn the update patches a security hole or two, then yes, you should apply it immediately.

If on the other hand you discover the update doesn’t fix any security holes (which most likely means that none exist), add any features you need or the like, don’t do it.

Have you ever had a router die on you? If so, were you given any warning?

Post a comment or two and let us know. Remember to list your router make and model.

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What Causes A Router To Fail?

Power Surge on Hub Port: A USB Device has exceeded the power limits of its hub port.

This message is followed by a dialog box which forces you to reset the USB device’s connection. Of course, this can get somewhat annoying as everytime I resume from standby I am greeted with this error.

The fix is to force the USB hub to work in USB 1.1 mode versus 2.0 mode. This Microsoft KB article explains how to make the change.

Of course, when going from USB 2.0 to 1.1 you will lose transfer speed, but in most cases you probably will not be able to tell the difference. If you get this error message and you absolutely need to keep the device in USB 2.0 mode, set your system’s BIOS to use S1 standby (instead of S3) as this will not completely power down the device and should work normally upon resuming.

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Fixing The USB Power Surge Error Message

If your broadband connection dies for whatever reason, you can use a simple 1-2-3 method which 99% of the time works in reestablishing your connection.

After turning OFF everything, you turn things on in this order:

1. Your modem. Power it on and wait two minutes so it can establish its connection. It usually doesn’t take this long, but better safe than sorry.

Modem won’t turn off? Unplug the power cord. If it still won’t turn off, inspect it for a battery backup. If it has one, pop the battery out, wait 10 seconds (to ensure it goes completely off), then pop it back in.

2. Your router. The router will establish a connection much faster than your modem will (usually in less than 10 seconds).

Router won’t turn off? Unplug the power cord. Plug back in to turn it on.

3. Your computer. Boot the computer as you normally would.

You turn things on in this order because the computer can’t make a network connection without the router booted and its connection established. The router can’t make a connection without the modem booted and its connection established. So in order for everything to connect properly, the power-on order has to be modem, router, computer. Computer connects to router which connects to modem.

Further troubleshooting tips

Modem will not establish a connection to the ISP

This is either the ISP’s fault or the modem’s fault. You need to call your ISP to troubleshoot this one. They (should) be able to confirm whether or not you need a replacement modem.

If it is the modem’s fault, in most instances the ISP will replace your modem free of charge if it was originally provided by them.

There is also the possibility the cabling going to the modem from the ISP might be faulty. The ISP will determine whether or not this is the case.

Modem will not establish a connection to the ISP at specific times of the day

This is actually a more common problem than you’d think. If you encounter the instance where your broadband connection stops only at very specific hours of the day, this is an instance where weather is affecting the connection. It normally happens at dawn or dusk where the ambient temperature outside changes enough to cause enough condensation where a connection filter on the pole fails. Once the condensation is gone, the connection magically (but not really) reestablishes itself.

Solution: ISP needs to send a tech out, get on the pole and replace a filter (or two).

You know if you have this problem if your connection cuts out at very specific times of the day for about 2 to 4 hours, then comes back. It should be noted that this is not a problem you can fix. The ISP has to take care of it.

It should also be noted that the ISP absolutely positively will not send out a tech unless your replace your modem first (because the ISP will always and without fail blame your equipment before anything else).

Router will not establish a connection to the modem

There’s an old saying in IT: 99% of all LAN problems are cabling.

The same reigns true with your small network setup at home. If a router won’t establish a connection to the router, replace the network cable first.

If the network connection still will not establish, consider replacing the router as there’s not much else you can do.

Wireless router will not broadcast

If you have a wireless router and you cannot make a connection to it over the air even if the computer is right next to it, change the channel. You have 11 to choose from in your router’s administration program. The channel you have chosen is most likely 6. Change to 11. If that doesn’t work, try 3.

This is assuming your wireless card still works properly.

Computer will not establish a connection to the router

Change your network cable first. If that doesn’t work, you have at least 3 other open physical ports on your router. Try a different one.

Network cards very rarely fail (as there’s not much to break). I don’t suggest replacing a NIC unless absolutely necessary.

Still having problems?

Our forums can help you out.

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How-To: The 1-2-3 Method Of Troubleshooting Your Broadband

From their website:

SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hard disks that support this feature and show hard disk temperatures too, if supported. [...] At the lowest level, SpeedFan is a hardware monitor software that can access digital temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can change fan speeds (depending on the capabilities of your sensor chip and your hardware) according to the temperatures inside your pc, thus reducing noise.

My motherboard did not come with software to monitor hardware temperatures which can be loaded into Windows, so SpeedFan is a great utility. Personally, I don’t mess with any fan speeds, but if you want to tweak your system to make it run a little quieter or cooler, try out the advanced features.

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Monitor Your System With SpeedFan

Warning Signs

In some cases, you start to see signs of a problem before the drive up and dies on you. Early warning signs include:

1. Computer freezes often. When it happens, the mouse cursor is unmovable and keyboard input is ignored. Nothing works and a restart is required to recover the computer.
2. Files Mysterious disappearing.
3. Frequent lock-up during booting. I say “frequent” because all computers will freeze every now and then and it doesn’t necessarily mean the drive is failing. You’re looking for a pattern here.
4. File access mysteriously slows to a turtle’s pace. Saving files or open files simply takes forever.

These are typical warning signs of a pending drive failure. When you start to see a noticeable increase in these patterns, backing up your data needs to take top priority. Otherwise you really are playing Russian roulette with your hard drive.

Signs of Real Failure

When the drive actually fails, it is a mechanical failure. Many times you will actually hear the drive making strange metallic noises. This is the read/write head thrashing around aimlessly and indicates failure. When your system has a crashed hard drive, it will not be able to boot. You may even get a blue screen of death.

Hard drive failure is a black and white thing. If the drive is working at all, you have a drive which is about to fail and is exhibiting the above warning signs in varying degrees. Once actual failure occurs, it just doesn’t work.

Diagnostics

The first thing to do is run through some inspection of the computer to see if this is indeed a drive failure. Here is a basic checklist. Now, if the PC was working fine and then just stopped working, chances are these items are not the case.

1. Check to ensure the power cable is properly connected to the drive.
2. Check to be sure the data cable is properly connected to the drive.
3. If it is an IDE drive, ensure the ribbon cable is aligned properly. Red edge of the cable is aligned with Pin 1 of the connector on the drive. Pin 1 is closest to the power plug, typically.
4. Master/slave assignment is correctly set if this is an IDE drive.

Once the physical connections have been verified, it’s good to see if the computer can even see the drive at all. If this is an IDE drive, go into the computer’s BIOS and have it auto-detect the drive. If it can detect it, then we know we have a solid connection. It doesn’t mean the drive is good, just that the BIOS can see it.

Using a bootable diskette for your anti-virus program, reboot and run a scan on the drive. It will scan the drive, including the boot partition, for viruses. If it finds anything, let it do it’s job. If it is able to successfully scan the drive at all, the drive is at least still working.

Use a third-party disk management program or simply FDISK to view the partitions on the drive. If no active partitions are found, then you know the partitions are screwed up. Unfortunately, that would be bad news. You can try a data recovery utility (see below) to recover the data. Otherwise, you will need to re-partition the drive and lose your data in the process.

You may want to run a ScanDisk or Check Disk on the drive. This is best if the drive is functioning partially. If you have a full mechanical failure, nothing will work. If some data is retrievable but others are not, then we have a partial failure. Try running Scandisk or Check Disk to scan the drive. Allow it to perform a full scan and fix anything it finds.

Yep, It’s Gone. Now What?

Well, first off, my heart goes out to you. If you didn’t use backups, you just lost a bunch of data. If you did, you are minimally looking at the annoying experience of having to set up the entire computer again.

Either way, you will need a new hard drive. Once installed, you set up the new hard drive as usual and re-install all your software. You then restore all your backups and you (hopefully) are good to go. Just trash the old drive. The data is not retrievable in most cases which means that throwing it away with your data on it is not really a risk.

Data Recovery

Too commonly people lose a hard drive that had data on it that was not backed up. These are the people who are then scrambling for ways to recover the data from a crashed hard drive. In some cases, this can be done. You should know up front, though, that it is going to cost you some money. Perhaps a lot of money. As of now, a quick Google search shows typical price ranges between $300 and $400. It isn’t cheap and you need to weigh out the cost of the service versus the cost of losing the data.

The art of data recovery depends solely on the nature of the drive failure. For example, if the electronics of the drive died but the mechanics are OK, then replacing the electronic board can revive the drive. Also, if the read/write head died but the platters still spin and are intact, then the data is still there. A new read/write head is needed to get the data.

The first thing would be to have your drive evaluated by a data recovery service. Since data recovery is very custom to the nature of the failure, prices vary.

Software Options

And since I know people will ask, no, there is no software utility out there that can recover data from a crashed hard drive. If the drive is not really crashed, then perhaps a disk utility can help you recover something. But, a true crash is a problem with the drive itself, and no software can overcome that one.

The data recovery software one finds when searching for it is designed to recover from accidental deletes or corrupted file structure. If these thing happen, there is a chance you can recover it on your own. Once the drive actually dies, though, your only option is to use a data recovery service.

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Hard Drive Failure: Warnings and Solutions

Basically, I seem to have an issue where my sound will skip/distort any time my processor is busy. And it doesn’t have to be anything significant, this can happen just when I’m opening up Firefox. Now, I can understand something like this happening on an old PC, but I don’t see why this would be a problem given the specs of this build. It doesn’t matter what program is playing an audio file, and the skipping/distorting is more pronounced if I have multiple programs/more memory-intensive programs running. I have tried a clean install, wiping everything and starting over, to no avail. As far as I can tell all of the parts I have work fine, but I still have this sound issue.

This problem is actually somewhat common. I have experienced it in the past myself. The usual solution is anything but obvious, though.

The short answer is that the problem lies in the modes specified for your primary and secondary IDE controllers. You usually have a hard drive and an optical drive. You need to have the modes set to DMA and not PIO.

First an explanation of the two:

• DMA (Direct memory access) mode is a high performance mode for transferring data to and from devices, in particular, to CD and DVD burner devices. DMA mode allows the processor to transfer large pieces of data with very little software overhead – therefore requiring low CPU utilization. In this mode, high speed burning can be performed in background with other programs running.
• Short for Programmed Input/Output, a method of transferring data between two devices that uses the computer’s main processor as part of the data path.

We need to be using DMA mode so that the processor can work on things like proper sound output and less on simple data transfer.

Windows will revert to PIO mode on the drives if it has any problems using DMA. And if the problem persists, Windows will just make it permanent and will continue to use PIO mode even if you specify DMA. So, there are two ways to tackle it.

Go to your device manager in the Control Panel, find your primary IDE channel, right-click and select Properties. Go to the Advanced tab and find the device you are configuring. Make sure “DMA if available” is selected. If you have anything connected to your secondary IDE channel, do the same for that one. You will need to reboot Windows for the change to take effect.

If that doesn’t fix it, it may be because Windows is forcing PIO. In this case, you actually want to uninstall the controller from the device manager. It may seem overkill, but on reboot, Windows will simply re-detect the controller and set it up.

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How To Fix Sound Distortion When PC Is Active

This is my video answer to the following submitted question:

A while back our tower randomly did not turn on when the power strip was turned on and the power button was pushed. We got a new power supply cord and it came right on. It stayed on for about a week but once it got shut down it didn’t come back on. I had the power supply itself tested at Best Buy and they said its the motherboard. Everything else turns on and when it was on everything worked fine. What do you think and/or recommend? Thanks

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Troubleshooting PC That Will Not Power Up

This is our first video answer to a question submitted via the Ask a Question feature on PCMech.com.

For information on the hack for allowing 3 gigabytes of RAM to be recognized by Windows XP 32-bit, check out the article called Practical Problems With 32bit Addressing In Windows on AnandTech for more info. You can also check out this page from Microsoft.

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Two Gigabyte Memory Cap in 32-Bit Windows XP

It got me thinking about remote tech support. If I could have simply logged into his computer and SHOWN him how to do it, we would have been done in a couple minutes.

Remote Tech Support

There are, today, multiple ways of logging into remote computers and controlling them from afar. They include:

• Remote Desktop (built into many versions of Windows)
• Virtual Network Computing (VNC)
• Third Party Services

Now, the first two are perfectly viable and can be done for free. However, you may run into some more complexities with these options. If you are trying to connect to a computer which is behind a network firewall, you may not be able to get past the firewall without some router configuration. Usually, this involves opening up certain ports on our router (VNC typically uses ports 5900 through 5906). Also, neither VNC or Remote Desktop are secure connections. While both can easily be protected with a password, a brute-force attack may be able to get through and gain access to the machine.

I highly prefer using a third-party service. The good news is that it doesn’t have to cost you anything. Logmein.com offers it for free.

LogMeIn.com

I have been a user of Logmein.com for some time. I actually have a paid account with them. The difference between a paid account and a free account is basically the ability to transfer files between computers. But, if all you want is to control a remote PC (remote desktop), you can do that for free.

So, you want to use Logmein.com to help a member of your family with a computer problem? Have them do the following:

1. Surf on over to www.logmein.com
2. Have them create a new account. They should select the LogmeIn Free account for Personal Remote Access.
3. Once registration is complete, they need to install the LogMeIn software to their computer. It will be a small software module which runs as a service under Windows.
4. Next, they need to send you the username and password to their Logmein.com account. You will also need the password they chose to secure their computer.
5. Log into their account and you will see their computer there on the list. Click on it, enter the password for the computer, and you will soon be looking right at their desktop.

You can then control the PC as if you were sitting right in front of it. And, they will be able to watch you as you control the computer. They will see their mouse cursor moving around and see everything you are doing. The LogMeIn connection is secure, so you don’t have to worry about anybody spying on what you’re doing.

Using VNC Instead

If you just refuse to use a convenient service, then you can give VNC a try. VNC will involve installing a server to their computer and a client to your’s. I prefer TightVNC. It is open source and free. Just install TightVNC to both your computer and their’s. Make sure to specify their’s as a server and your’s as the client. Then, you will need to configure their router to allow the VNC ports through the firewall. Lastly, you will need to look up their IP address so that you can connect to the IP address directly using yout TightVNC client.

Lifehacker posted a little more detail on how to use VNC to remote control a computer. Here is another feature post by them on how to access a computer behind a firewall.

It is obvious, though, that using a service like LogMeIn is much easier. They take care of all the data transfer issues between the computers, meaning you don’t have to worry about IP addresses, firewalls, or any network mumbojumbo .

Safeguard Your Hair

With this, now you can help people out with their computers and not go bald.

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How to Help Somebody With Their PC Remotely

Overview of the Ultimate Troubleshooter v.4.21 Product.

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Ultimate Troubleshooter